One of the last century’s great scientists, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, known as the father of modern neuroscience, yearned as a boy to be an artist. Later in life, the Spaniard made remarkable pencil and ink drawings of the brain’s mysterious inner workings, a creative undertaking that helped lead him to the groundbreaking discoveries for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1906.

More than 80 of Cajal’s 3,000 anatomical drawings, work that’s reminiscent of the great Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci, are on view until Dec. 3 in the The Beautiful Brain at UBC’s Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. It’s the first North American exhibition of Cajal’s work and may leave visitors wondering why Cajal, who lived from 1852 to 1934, isn’t better known outside scientific circles, where his work is still used for educational and illustrative purposes.

One of Cajal’s images, the pyramidal neuron of the cerebral cortex, a 1904 ink-and-pencil drawing on paper, has such spindly lines it could be mistaken for a vegetable root. Indeed, many of his drawings have a botanical quality and are often described as tree-like. The scientist himself used such metaphors in his writing. For example, he described the brain’s gray matter as a “flower garden” and once asked “are there any trees more elegant and luxurious than the Purkinje cell from the cerebellum?”

But Cajal’s artfulness went further. In his 1914 drawing, injured Purkinje neurons, one broken neuron looks like a penguin floating away sideways. And in a drawing of the brain cells of a paralyzed man, a neuron in the upper left corner looks remarkably like the face of a man screaming in agony.

Cajal generally drew from memory after spending hours peering into his microscope. Through this creative process, he developed ideas about the brain’s workings and championed a then-radical theory that the brain is made up of discrete cells called neurons that are separated by gaps, later confirmed as the spaces where synapses occur. His ideas challenged a popular theory of the day that the brain was one continuous network of cells. Interestingly, Cajal had to imagine that information was passed across gaps because no microscopes at the time were powerful enough to detect them. His idea was only confirmed in the 1950s, long after his death.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, "Untitled (self portrait)," c.1885

The exhibition includes fascinating electron microscope views of the brain, contemporary images that are brilliantly coloured and show a variety of structures. The Belkin also delves into ideas about human consciousness with Thought Forms, a show that includes paintings Lawren Harris completed while he was exploring theosophy. They are based on auras and other metaphysical subjects rather than the Group of Seven artist’s famed mountain scenery.